The Psychology of Product Onboarding Experience
Strategies and Resources for Creating User-Friendly Onboarding!
As UX professionals, our day-to-day responsibilities involve understand our users and in today’s issue, we want to explore Product Onboarding and understand how users perceive, learn, and engage with a new product or service.
Whether you're designing a mobile app, a website, or any digital product, an engaging onboarding process can make all the difference. Let's dive in!
The Importance of Onboarding
User Retention Starts Here
Effective onboarding sets the stage for a successful user journey. It's your chance to make a stellar first impression and ensure users understand your product's value.
When done right, onboarding can:
Reduce User Abandonment: A confusing or overwhelming initial experience often leads to users abandoning your product. Onboarding helps reduce this churn by providing clarity.
Increase User Engagement: Onboarding introduces users to the key features and benefits, piquing their interest and encouraging them to explore further.
Build Trust: Well-crafted onboarding establishes trust by demonstrating your commitment to helping users achieve their goals.
Enhance User Satisfaction: Users who understand your product are more likely to have a positive experience, leading to higher satisfaction rates and potential word-of-mouth recommendations.
Step 1: Understanding Your Users
You Need To Know Your Users In and Out
To create an onboarding process that truly resonates with your audience, you must first understand who your users are, what they need, and how they interact with your product. This understanding is not a one-time effort but an ongoing practice that informs every stage of your design process.
User Personas: Start by developing user personas, highly detailed representations of your typical users. Consider factors such as demographics, goals, pain points, and behavioral patterns. User personas help you humanize your audience and make design decisions that cater to their specific needs and preferences.
Empathy Maps: Create empathy maps that outline what your users think, feel, see, hear, and say during their interaction with your product. This allows you to design onboarding experiences that not only meet their functional needs but also resonate on an emotional level
E.g. Imagine Sarah, our working mom persona, during her first interaction with your e-commerce app. She might be feeling overwhelmed, time-crunched, and anxious about making the right purchase decisions. Understanding her emotional state can guide you to create an onboarding process that provides reassurance, simplifies the shopping process, and instills confidence in her choices.Journey Mapping: Journey maps help you visualize the user's path from the moment they discover your product to becoming a loyal customer. This allows you to identify key touchpoints and pain points along the way.
For instance, you might discover that Sarah's journey starts with downloading your app, then progresses through registration, browsing, adding items to the cart, and making a purchase. By mapping this journey, you can strategically insert onboarding elements at crucial junctures, ensuring that they enhance rather than disrupt the overall flow.
Step 2: Simplify the First Steps
Think about the tour guide giving you a straightforward map. Here's how to simplify the start:
Minimize Friction: Remove unnecessary hurdles and steps. Keep it as simple as possible.
Video Tutorials: Create short videos that demonstrate how to perform key actions or navigate your product.
Clear Progression: Outline a clear path for users to follow. What are the essential steps they need to take?
Tooltips and Guides: Use tooltips, pop-ups, or guides to explain features and functionalities as users encounter them.
Tip: Always allow users to exit the onboarding process or skip certain steps. For users who are already familiar with your product or prefer to explore on their own, forcing them through onboarding can be counterproductive.
Step 3: Gather Feedback and Iterate
Just as a tour guide seeks feedback to improve the tour, you should do the same:
Monitor User Analytics: Analyze user behavior and drop-off rates during onboarding using analytics tools like Google Analytics or MixPanel. Identify bottlenecks or points where users tend to abandon the process.
User Feedback: Collect feedback from current users. What challenges did they face during onboarding? What information did they find most valuable?
Feedback Mechanisms: Incorporate ways for users to provide feedback during and after onboarding.
Analyze and Improve: Regularly review feedback and data to identify areas for improvement in your onboarding process.
Scenario: Creating an onboarding experience for a new mobile app.
Let's say you're developing a new mobile app for travel enthusiasts. Here's how to apply these steps:
Step 1 - Understand Your Users: Research your target audience and from the insights and feedback you gather, create personas, empathy maps and journey maps to paint their travel planning process.
Step 2 - Simplify the First Steps: Using the insights from step 1, design a straightforward onboarding flow that highlights the core features and benefits. Use tooltips or short videos tutorials to explain how to navigate the app and use key features.
Step 3 - Gather Feedback and Iterate: Integrate Google Analytics and Mix panel to track user behaviour during the onboarding process. Include in-app surveys and feedback forms to collect user insights and continuously improve the onboarding experience.
By following these steps, your mobile app can provide users with a seamless onboarding process, setting them up for success.
5 Psychological principles for effective product onboarding experiences
1. Cognitive Load: Minimize cognitive load by presenting information in a clear, concise, and structured manner. Too much information too soon can overwhelm users.
2. Information Chunking: Break down information into smaller, digestible chunks to make it easier for users to absorb and remember.
3. Progressive Disclosure: Start with essential information during onboarding and progressively reveal more advanced features as users become more familiar with the product to prevent overwhelm.
4. Feedback and Reinforcement: Provide immediate feedback, positive reinforcement, and rewards for completing onboarding tasks to stimulate motivation and pleasure through the release of dopamine.
5. Emotional Engagement: Consider the emotional impact of your onboarding process and how it aligns with your brand's tone and values, as people are more likely to remember experiences with emotional resonance.
Recommended Resources on Onboarding
UserOnboard: This website provides a wealth of resources, including teardowns of onboarding experiences from popular products, best practices, and case studies.
Better Onboarding by Krystal Higgins: This book demonstrates how the best onboarding experiences guide people as they interact, helping them follow their own path to success.
User Onboarding UX: Accessing articles, social media posts, videos and academic papers on user onboarding.
User Onboarding Tools: Access a list of tools that you can use to set up a seamless onboarding process for the products you work on.
Tip: filter by Automated Feedback use case
As you embark on this journey to create seamless onboarding experiences, remember that your goal is to be the friendly guide that helps users take their first steps with confidence.
Happy onboarding creation!
Warm regards,